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Pixar Switches to Mac OS X and G5s
fmorgan writes "No big surprise here: when Apple introduced the G5 at 2003 WWDC, it become more a question of 'when' Pixar will move to G5s, than 'if'). At the same conference, Apple showed a new codec for Mac OS X named 'Pixlet,' developed with Pixar. In last year O'Reilly's Mac OS X conference, there was a presentation on how Pixar moved their desktop/office environment to Mac OS X. Now it seems it's the main production work: 'Apple's Don Peebeles said that Pixar has used Linux and Intel-based architecture in 2003, but that Pixar was switching to Mac OS X and G5 workstations for its production work: Peebles went on to say that this switch was "a move that no doubt made common CEO Steve Jobs very happy."'"
I've been telling people for some time now to watch Pixar closely now that the G5 and OS X has matured. It was only a matter of time before they finally switched the SGI and Linux stations over. The rendar farm however still uses a mixture of SUNs and SGI but I've no doubt that G5 Xserves would probably fit in quite nicely... now if they can only start shipping the damn things.
Peebles went on to say that this switch was "a move that no doubt made common CEO Steve Jobs very happy."
...a move that just has to be a wee bit influenced by the FUD of SCO's IP claims on Linux too.
was CEO of Disney and switched Disney to Windows (stricly on merits mind you), people would be screaming bloody murder.
Oh wait...
After all, with Jobs as CEO of both companies, why wouldn't Apple be used for Pixar's needs, especially if they're capable? An american kiritsu?
I don't see this as big news. It would be big news, if, say, they moved to a linux distribution (considering that Jobs is CEO of both Pixar and Apple, and linux could be seen as a competitor to Apple). This is nothing more than free publicity for apple, and probably an "at-cost" transaction for Pixar for new hardware and software.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
With Steve Jobs head honcho at both companies, you would have thought this would have happened a long time ago. Of course, the G5's entering the picture helps quite a bit I'm sure.
Will the rendering farm also be switching to the G5 in the future, ala Virginia Tech?
Will we now see Photorealistic Renderman come out for OSX and the G5? Hopefully?
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
I'm running Gentoo, so I don't care if I have to specially compile. I just want a machine that's going to actually USE the MHz it comes with. (Without resorting to massive cache.)
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
G5 + OS X + Maya + Photoshop + Pixlet = one kickass production environment.
Really though do they need to change the Linux farm? I'd be surprised if they did, there's no real need...
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
I seem to remember someone from Pixar saying that they were moving over to G5 work stations. As for the Render Farm I believe they just purchased a whole lot of 2.8Ghz Xeons (if I remember correctly) and so it would probably not make sense for them to go and buy a ton of Macs for that right at the moment. Besides Steve knows when Apple's upgrade schedule is. They will buy Dual 3Ghz or 4Ghz Xserves before they need to render the next Pixar release I bet.
Apple in the movie industry? I've never seen an Apple computer in a movie...
Apple hardware is tied to the OS when you buy it. It's the same reason why Apple will never port OS X to x86 - Apple's a hardware company first, using the software to help sell the hardware. Either way, I'm sure Apple's selling the systems to Pixar at-cost anyway, so it's not like it's going to add to the cost, and OS X is a worthy Unix system that happens to have a rather pretty interface on top. So the question is more why wouldn't they go with OS X?
Virginia Tech's "Big Mac" has proved the G5 to be very powerful in a cluster.
umm.. the G5 isn't a consumer machine. It is a professional workstation. Apple's consumer machines are the iBook/eMac/iMac. Pretty much Anything with an X or Power infront of it are professional machines.
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
Oh puhleez, that's so 1999! Have you priced out performance / price ratios for tier 1 manufacturers? G5's do smackingly well, especially against Dells and the like, often coming out much cheaper before considering things like support costs and reliability and resale. Pixar isn't going to build their own bargain bin beige boxes. Look at VirginiaTech's shopping research, they paid full price to Apple and it was still cheaper/faster than Dell.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Jobs buys 500 G5's for Pixar
The next week, Apple comes out and lowers all the prices $300 and doubles the RAM and HD space, and includes iPods with every purchase.
Now, is Pixar going to end every movie with a shitty gif of a spinning Apple logo that says "Made on a Mac" ?
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
SGI hardware is expensive and not so far ahead these days, many have been replacing SGI boxes for Macs and Linux boxes.
Just as likely not, he may want to keep clean hands on this one for credibility. Remember that the high-profile VirginiaTech project had tons more marketroid benefits for Apple but the whole deal was basically retail. They wouldn't have to get discounts for this decision fo fly anyway, the price/performance&quality ratio is favourable.
Damn those pesky terrorists
The most important question that hasn't been asked yet: Will Debian continue to use Pixar characters as the names of their releases?
I mean really.
c'mon.
Yeah...
What about this?
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Why select a slower, more expensive platform and take on the cost of porting one's in-house software to yet another platform, when multi-processor AMD-64 chips running GNU/Linux are a dime a dozen?
Here's my dime...need my shipping address?
Except that Apple makes quite a lot of hardware. Microsoft doesn't make much hardware (keyboards, mice, joysticks, etc), while SCOG was a software company (as Caldera) but is now a litigation company.
Why select a slower, more expensive platform and take on the cost of porting one's in-house software to yet another platform, when multi-processor AMD-64 chips running GNU/Linux are a dime a dozen?
Because for the applications Pixar has in mind, G5 Macs are neither slower nor more expensive. It's really that simple. G5s deliver the best bang for the buck in the video editing world, period.
I would really, really like to see the "Macs are more expensive" meme disappear from these arguments. They're not more expensive than PCs of comparable power and quality, and haven't been for years.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
They are probably waiting until they get to 100,000 UNIQUE stories
It's probably cost-effective for such huge consumers of computer power to swap out their equipment on roughly an annual basis. The difference between, say, a dual 2ghz and a dual 3ghz system would be huge for them.
Now that I'm doing more video production I'll probably be doing that too, and using my current dual G5 as a render farm for my new main machine. Based on the results I'm getting and the speeds I get, it would be well worth the money to do that.
Finally, I don't think Pixar's stockholders are in much of a mood to be cheap. Say it costs US$1 million a year to replace their equipment. Finding Nemo is a well over billion-dollar property. Do stockholders care about spending $1 million to make sure the (most likely pretty high paid) people over there get the best equipment?
Somehow I doubt it.
D
G5's with optimized software being slower for production work is debatable. You haven't seen the next generation of hardware yet, they already have a 1GHz bus, and these production machines have enormous internal bandwidth requirements. Use one for video or 3D work sometimes, then come back here and complain about their speed.
more expensive platform
Since these are production machines, they need to be very reliable and plug-it-in and go. Make me a machine with the same level of reliability, quiet, power requirements, speed, connectivity, and production capabilities with equivalent warranty then let's compare pricing. Never mind, I just finished a committee-based 3-week shopping grind for similar production requirements and I already know the answer: apple hardware wins by about 5% on price alone, and still spec's out better for multimedia production. Oh, and ROI in terms of productivity, support, and longevity.
and take on the cost of porting one's in-house software to yet another platform, when multi-processor AMD-64 chips running GNU/Linux are a dime a dozen?
RTFA. They aren't porting anything new since these are production machines, not render nodes. Maya, photoshop, shake, pixlet, backed by a top-notch interface and bsd, mmm... hey, you're not an artist, are you?
Anyway, for the ROI alone, this is good for shareholders, especially if creativity flows better.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Um... I assume that you are referring to the myth that Macs are more expensive. I would point you in the direction of reality on two counts:
1. Take a look at price/performance on the dual G5's. Many other people have, and they have been pretty unanimous that the Apple's win. See University of Virginia. The client computers are also competing against mainly SGI boxes... You will have a better time in your comparison of the linux render farm, but then you start to have to look at boxes competing against the XServe, and you will find them also very price competitive against the other server farm boxes they are competing against.
2. In terms of the price of production the hardware is one of the smaller costs. The big price is the people, this is also the place where the difference between a failure and a success will happen. If someone blames hardware for a bad pixar movie, they are simply stupid.
Any lawyer who cannot convince a jury of both of these points is incompetent.
Are people that assume all Mac users are these mindless people that need one button mice.
I've been doing work on UNIX computers and other platforms for years and years. I bought a Mac because it has a great front end to make simple things simple, and the UNIX backend stuff to make hard things possible. I still use GnuEmacs and it works just fine on OS X.
Also, the licence you apparently are seeking is GPL - the whole POINT of the BSD licence is that companies can make use of the code in the way they are doing. The developers working on BSD chose to work on BSD over Linux or some other GPL system knowing exactly this. As a coder I would think you would be proud to have something you wrote in such widespread use, instead of being a greedy whiner who is upset someone else is making money by using your code. Write your own amazing thing to make money from the code you wrote. Heck, by Apple stock when they adopt your code if you believe in it strongly!! That would have turned out really well for anyone who bought Apple stock around the time when they released OS X at large. They took the risks and also reaped the rewards, which anyone could have shared in.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not knowing the details of what they're running, I'm guessing when I say the answer is AltiVec. The cheapest way to run Apache or Samba isn't necessarily the cheapest way to do heavy computation.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
If there is anything you learn about SJ quickly, it is that he is the absolute definition of "hands-on".
If this wasn't run past Steve and fully approved by him at a minimum, I would be surprised. That he was likely asking hard questions and pushing his team to do it, wouldn't surprise me at all.
One of Apple's major customer segments is video prodution for television and movies. Apple for years has had an extremely strong niche in the Entertainment industry (why do you think you see Macs in almost every TV show and movie as the "computer of choice"?). Over the last 18 months they have spent a lot acquiring products to fill out their digital video, video effects, and audio editing and production product line. What we have hear is showing, by eating their own dog food, that they are serious and that you can do it all on the Mac.
Steve is the master salesman and technical visionary. His finger-prints are all over this move!
If Steve had ordered Pixar to switch to mac, they would have done it at 10.0. Apple earned that customer.
You don't seem to understand the modern rendering workload. Its all I/O. A typical frame of geometry (>10GB) won't even fit into most memories, much less the textures which are often orders of magnitude larger. This is not your typical game or raytracer which loads everything in a couple seconds at the beginning and spends half an hour crunching numbers. Tremendous effort is spent paging stuff in and out and keeping memory from overflowing. Also keep in mind that it needs to probably be sucked over the network in the first place.
Having the additional address space of the 64-bit system will help a lot, as will the high throughput of the G5.
The Opteron may make sense here as well, but the software isn't mature enough yet for them to be able to run all the systems on it. Windows doesn't support the 64-bit yet, of course, and Linux stuff varies. For example, they presumably will want good 3D acceleration for the modeling if they really want to be able to use a certain system uniformly in their operation, and the performance of Linux 64-bit 3D drivers isn't up to the traditional x86 yet (and often won't even work if you have >4GB RAM).
I don't know what % Jobs personally owns, but insiders own 57% of the company. Jobs stands to gain a lot more money by doing something to help Pixar than by doing something to help Apple that hurts Pixar.
It will be a glorious, shiny Apple logo rotating though Calabi-Yau space, and the mere act of watching it will give you inner peace, deep insight, and three orgasms.
--- Ban humanity.
Pixar will switch to whatever is currently going to suit their needs the best... in their business, they aren't going to sit around and use "legacy" stuff just because of previous investment.. you will see them re-tool much more often than a traditional business.
Also for math (especially floating point) calculations, the G5 (PPC970) is much superior to the Intel IA-32 (not really a big thing if all you do is run Word, of course).
According to a talk by "Dr. BigMac" (from VA Tech) the only other high-volume CPU approaching it was the Intel Itanium, and here (quite an irony) Intel was under-clocked! (The G5, last year, was shipping at 2Gh, the Itanium less than that).
As for price, you can't compare a Dual G5 with a $200 walmart pc; but check the prices of any dual Dell Xeon system.
Um... I assume that you are referring to the myth that Macs are more expensive.
Anybody who wants to quote the "Macs are more expensive" line of FUD has never taken a look at the price of Sun or especially SGI hardware.
Hell, SGI doesn't list the prices of things on their page, they tell you to call and ask. That's the computer equvalent of "market price."
OS X:*nix for the real world.
If SCO pulled a magic rabbit out of there but and somehow proved they had IP rights to all of Linux and killed it off would the world grind to a stop? Would Slashdot go with it? Would people who participate in Slashdot die from grief? I don't think so. To imagine that Linux will be around forever and that encouraging that at ALL costs is foolish. I work in the real world where companies have to make money and protect their IP. To me GPL goes against this. If given a choice of a GPL license or a BSD license I opt for BSD every time.
People who take the holeyer than though view of Open Source are definitely walking the high road. It's a narrow-mindedness that I can't believe I'm hearing when coming from someone that I would normally consider to be highly intelligent. To me an example of the true spirit of Open Source is Apple. They took BSD and created Darwin and then release regularly the modifications to that operating system. That is truly honorable considering that with the freedom of BSD they do not HAVE to do so.
Plus, I don't think Steve Jobs would care if his xservers were running Linux or better yet BSD (pref Darwin) without OSX. Apple makes their money selling hardware. I really don't consider Microsoft to be a competitor of Apple. I think the real competitors are Dell, HP, etc..
Anyways, please step down from your Open Source soapbox and take a breath of air with the rest of us down here in the real world.
I realize that this comment might catch me some heat but Jesus I can't listen to this self centered propaganda any more.
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
all the BSD developers who freely allowed us to steal^H^H^H^H^Huse your code
If I give you a beer, you didn't steal it from me.
You know, it's rather bizarre... the Linux/GPL fanatics will scream endlessly in the war against SCO about how licensing lets the copyright-holder do whatever they please with their code, and if the copyright-holder wishes to give it out for free with a license like the GPL which says it has to always remain open-source then that's their god-given right by law. Isn't that the counter to SCO's claim that the GPL is illegal?
So listen: you can't have it both ways. If licensing lets the copyright-holder come up with whatever terms s/he wishes, then that includes the BSD license which the copyright-holder VOLUNTARILY used. The people who wrote FreeBSD gave it to the community under the terms of the BSD licenses so that things like what Apple did could SPECIFICALLY happen. In essence, FreeBSD freely gave itself to Apple.
How is that stealing? FreeBSD said "Feel free to use our code to make money however you want". Apple did just that. Give it a rest.
What's the advantage to Pixar??? WTF!
The teams at Pixar are at the pinnacle of their industry. They do not take software and hardware choice lightly. They have not and would not till this day switch to using Apple solutions unless they proved superior. They have no use for hardware and software politics.
The evolution has been going on for some time at Apple.
Jobs has remade Apple software and hardware Pro Lines specifically for Hollywood, the CGI industries and this.
XServe, Xserve Raids, OpenGL direct rendering, xCode Tools for Rapid Development and distributive computing, XServe licensing and OS X licensing all are extremely cost effective. linux and Unix software has been ported OS X. G5 optimized Render-man, Shake, and the necessary tools are there.
This is the future and Apple is very much a part of it, deservedly so. A lot of extremely talented people have been working their asses of pursuing this dream for years and years now. This is just the first picking of an abundant and fruitful harvest for these folks.
More power to them!!!!!
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